Eminescian poetic lexicology (II): „poetic tongue” and „poetic language”

The analysis follows the stages of development occurred within the theoretical frame of DLPE project (The Dictionary of Eminescu’s Poetic Language) undertaken at “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi by a research team from the Interdisciplinary Department of Socio-Humanistic Sciences. Our focus directs chiefly toward lax notions such as poetic sign and poetic language, as they represent the actual DLPE entries and minimal unities. Disengaged of virtual semiotic debates, also of debatable definitions, both of them relate to Mihai Eminescu’s particular conception on “hieroglyph” as the purest poetic figure of them all. However, neither for the Romanian poet nor for his virtual interpreters the poetic sign should belong to abstract speculations; a presumptive mixture of iconic levels (handwriting icons, verbal icons, imaginary icons), the concept evinces its broad complexity when Perpessicius’ edition of complete works (and variants) and Eminescu’s own notebooks are collated. This claims a refinement of method, the making of the poetic sign’s cultural narrative, which re-assumes the fact that the primary condition of poetic signs refers back to the artist’s graphic traces, to the script of his dynamic personality.

Keywords: Poetic sign, Poetic language, Poetic lexicology, Hieroglyph, Genetic criticism, Manuscript

• ***Dicționarul limbii române literare contemporane / Dictionary of contemporary Romanian literary language, 4 vol., Editura Academiei R.S.R., București, 1955-1957

• Both Ioana, Eminescu explicat fratelui meu / Eminescu explained to my brother, Editura ART, Bucureşti, 2012

• Bulgăr, Gheorghe, De la cuvânt la metaforă în variantele liricii eminesciene / From word to metaphor in the version of the Eminescian poetry, Editura Junimea, Iași, 1975

• Bulgăr, Gheorghe, Eminescu: coordonate istorice şi stilistice ale operei / Eminescu: historic and stylistic coordinates of his work, Editura Junimea, Iași, 1980

• Bulgăr, Gheorghe, Momentul Eminescu în evoluţia limbii române literare / The Eminescu moment in the evolution of Romanian literary language, Editura Minerva, București, 1971

• Cimpoi, Mihai, Mihai Eminescu. Dicționar enciclopedic / Mihai Eminescu. Encyclopaedic dictionary, Editura Gunivras, Chișinău, 2012

• Constantinescu, Viorica S., Dicţionar de cultură poetică. Eminescu / Dictionary of poetic culture. Eminescu, Editura Universitas XXI, Iași, 2010

• Eminescu, Mihai, Fragmentarium / Fragmentarium, ed. after mss. with versions, notes, addenda and indices by Magdalena Vatamaniuc, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, Bucureşti, 1981

• Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark, Conceptual Integration Networks, Cognitive Science,22(2),1998,133-187, http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon/BEIJING/CIN.pdf

• Gregori, Ilina, Ştim noi cine a fost Eminescu? Fapte, enigme, ipoteze / Do we know who Eminescu was? Facts, enigmas, hypotheses, Editura ART, Bucureşti, 2008

• Irimia, Dumitru (coord.), Dicționarul limbajului poetic eminescian. Semne și sensuri poetice, I. Arte / Dictionary of the Eminescian poetic language. Poetic signs and meanings, I. Arts, Editura Universității „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iași, 2005, II. Elemente primordiale / II. Primordial elements, Editura Universității „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iași, 2007

• Irimia, Dumitru (coord.), Concordanțele prozei antume / The concordances of the anthumous prose, Editura Universității „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Iași, 2009

• Irimia, Dumitru (coord.), Dicționarul limbajului poetic eminescian. Concordanțele poeziilor antume, 2 vol. / The dictionary of the Eminescian poetic language. The concordances of the anthumous poems, 2 vol., Memorialul Ipotești – Centrul Național de Studii „Mihai Eminescu”, Editura Axa, Botoșani, 2002

• Irimia, Dumitru (coord.), Dicționarul limbajului poetic eminescian. Concordanțele poeziilor postume, 4 vol. / The dictionary of the Eminescian poetic language. The concordances of the posthumous poems, 4 vol., Editura Universității Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iași, 2006

• Irimia, Dumitru, Limbajul poetic eminescian / The Eminescian poetic language, Editura Junimea, Iași, 1979

• Marcus, Solomon, Un nou dicţionar Eminescu / A new Eminescu dictionary, in „România literară”, no. 4, 2007

• Marian, Rodica, Șerban, Felicia, Dicţionarul „Luceafărului” eminescian / The Dictionary of Eminescu‘s „Morning Star” and the full text of the poem, Editura Clusium, Cluj-Napoca, 2000

• Rosetti, Alexandru, Gheție, Ion, Studii de istoria limbii române literare. Secolul al XIX-lea / Studies on the history of Romanian literary language. 19^th century, vol. II, Editura pentru literatură, București, 1969

• Seche, Luiza, Lexicul artistic eminescian în lumina statistică / The Eminescian artistic language in statistic perspective, Editura Academiei R.S.R., București, 1974

• Steiner,George, După Babel. Aspecte ale limbii şi traducerii / After Babel. Aspects of language and translation, Univers, Bucureşti, 1983

• Stockwell, Peter, Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction, Routledge, London& New York, 2002

• Vancu, Radu, Eminescu. Trei eseuri / Eminescu. Three essays, InfoArt Media – Argonaut, Sibiu – Cluj-Napoca, 2011

• Tudor Vianu (coord), Dicționarul limbii poetice a lui Eminescu / The dictionary of Eminescu’s poetic language, Editura Academiei R.S.R., București, 1968

Mihail Sebastian and the probable ambivalence

Two recent studies about Mihail Sebastian written by two important Romanian literary critics re-open the debate around several key topics: the relationship between the cultural assimilation of the Jews and right wing extremism, the limits of aestheticism (both as a way of life and as a critical method), the importance of biography, factual data for understanding artistic achievements, the status of fiction, among others. Although their interests seem different, Mihai Iovănel and Marta Petreu seem to share the assumption that the literary object no longer has something valuable to offer when faced with the overpowering clarity of the ideological understanding of literature. I beg to differ and subsequently I would like to show that neglecting the literary object could make one entirely miss an essential ideological dimension of the writer in question. In this particular case, the marginal ambivalent identity of the “stranger” shared by Sebastian with many other modern Jewish writers.

Keywords: marginality, ambivalence, aestheticism, ideology, fictionality.

• Bauman, Zygmunt – Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity Press, 1993.

• Iovănel, Mihai – Evreul improbabil. Mihail Sebastian: o monografie ideologică. / The Improbable Jew. Mihail Sebastian: An Ideological Monograph. București, ed. Cartea Românească, 2012.

• Iser, Wolfgang – The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anhtropology. Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1993.

• Johnson, Paul – A History of the Jews, HarperCollins, 1988.

• Petreu, Marta – Diavolul și ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu – Mihail Sebastian / The Devil and his Apprentice, Iași, Ed. Polirom, 2009.

• Sebastian, Mihai – De două mii de ani… Cum am devenit huligan. / For Two Thousand Years… How I Became a Hooligan, București, Ed. Humanitas, 1990.

• Simmel, Georg, „The Stranger” în Wolff, Kurt – The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York, Free Press, 1950, pp. 402-408

• Park, Robert E. – Human Migration and the Marginal Man”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 6 (mai, 1928), pp. 883-892.

• Toulmin, Stephen – Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernism, University of Chicago Press, 1990.

A moment of merging opportunities. “Amfiteatru”.

The following study analyses the role that the Amfiteatru phenomenon played in the construction of the so-called „generation 80”. Everyone agrees that the birth date of this poetical generation was the early spring of 1977, when the literary circle Cenaclul de Luni had its first meeting. But few years before that moment, when most of these young writers were students, this magazine (i.e. Amfiteatru) encouraged them to write their own poetry, deeply different from the poetry of their forerunners. Besides, the periodical was conceived as an intellectual nursery: edited by U.A.S.C.R. (The Union of the Associations of the Communist Students of Romania), Amfiteatru favored the undergraduate authors. Nowadays, it may seem normal, but in the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, it was a downright opportunity.

Keywords: contemporary Romanian literature, generation ’80, Romanian literary magazines, Romanian literary circles, Radu Călin Cristea, Magda Cârneci, M.N. Rusu, Constanța Buzea

• Amfiteatru / Amphitheatre, revistă literară și artistică editată de Uniunea Asociațiilor Studențești din Republica Socialistă România, colecție (1976 – 1989)

• Ghica, Magdalena, Hipermateria / Hypermatter, București, Cartea Românească, 1980

• Cârneci, Magda, Art of the 1980s in Eastern Europe. Texts on Postmodernism, Pitești, Editura Paralela 45, 1999

• Stratan, Ion, Cinci cântece pentru eroii civilizatori / Five songs for the civilizing heroes, București, Albatros, 1983

• Iaru, Florin, La cea mai înaltă ficțiune / At the highest fiction, București, Cartea Românească, 1984

• Popa, Marian, Istoria literaturii române de azi pe mâine / The History of Romanian literature. Today for tommorow, 2 vol., versiune revizuită și augmentată, București, Semne, 2009

• Manolescu, Nicolae, Istoria critică a literaturii române. Cinci secole de literatură / The critical history of Romanian literature. Five centuries of literature,, Piteşti, Editura Paralela 45, 2008.

Representations of Identity in Memoirs of Romanian Writers in Exile

Inextricably intertwined with the dynamics of identities in the present-day Romanian culture, the memoirs of Romanian writers in exile have provided essential ground for the analysis of the symbolic roles that these writers have assumed in the past as well as in the present in relation to their home and host cultural spaces. Having experienced uprootedness that entailed cultural alienation, with a significant impact on their sense of identity, these writers have created, within the limits of their texts, compensatory worlds in which the (auto-)biographical ideological frames determining “official” representations of identity are reshaped by aesthetic ideologies. Assumed and integrated in the process of identity reconstruction, these aesthetic ideologies allow the emergence of invariable patterns that concern the writers’ relationship with their homeland, which revolve around either the “sense of belonging” or, on the contrary, the “sense of difference”.

Keywords: exile memoirs, identity-focused narrative, “life stories”, autobiographic space, the writing of difference

• Corpus

• Horia, Vintilă, „Un scriitor împotriva timpului său” [„A Writer against his Time”], în Secolul XXI, nr. 10 -12 / 1997, 1 – 3 / 1998, Exil

• Horia, Vintilă, Suflete cu umbra pe pământ – portrete şi reflecţii memorialistice [Shadow Souls on Earth – Portraits and Memorial Reflections], Bucureşti, Editura „Jurnalul literar”, 2004

• Lovinescu, Monica, Jurnal esenţial [Essential Journal], Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2010

• Manea, Norman, Plicuri şi portrete [Envelopes and Portraits], Iaşi, Polirom, 2004

• Manea, Norman, Despre Clovni: Dictatorul şi Artistul [On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist] (ediţia a II-a, revăzută), Iaşi, Polirom, 2005

• Müller, Herta, Regele se înclină şi ucide [The King Bows and Kills], Iaşi, Polirom, 2005

• Tănase, Virgil, România mea. Convorbiri cu Blandine Tézé-Delafon [My Romania. Talks with Blandine Tézé-Delafon], în româneşte de Irina Petraş, Bucureşti, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 1996

• Tănase, Virgil, Leapşa pe murite. Document poliţist şi literar, Bucureşti, Adevărul Holding, 2011

• Studii

• Baugnet, Lucy, L’identité sociale [The Social Identity] Paris, Dunod, 1998

• Bourdieu, Pierre, L’Illusion biographique [The biographical Illusion], în Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, iunie 1986, Vol. 62-63

• Durand, Gilbert, L’imaginaire. Essai sur les sciences et la philosophie de l’image [The Imaginary. Essay about the Sciences and the Philosophy of the Image], Paris, Hatier, 1994

• Gheorghiu, Mihai Dinu, Intelectualii în câmpul puterii. Morfologii şi traiectorii sociale [The Intellectuals in the Field of Power. Morphologies and Social Trajectories], Iaşi, Polirom, 2007

• Gusdorf, Georges, Auto-bio-graphie. Lignes de vie 2 [Auto-bio-graphy. Rows of Life 2], Odile Jacob, Paris, 1991

• Le Blanc, Guillaume, Dedans, dehors. La condition d’étranger [Inside, outside. The Stranger Condition], Paris, Seuil, 2010

• Lejeune, Philippe, Le pacte autobiographique. Nouvelle édition augmentée [The Autobiographical Pact], Seuil, Paris, 1996

• L’Ecuyer, René, Le Concept de soi [The Concept of Self] Paris, PUF, 1978

• Maffesoli, Michel, Au creux des apparences. Pour une éthique de l’esthétique [In the Crucible of Appearances. For an Ethics of Aesthetics], Éditions de la Table Ronde, 2007

• Milosz, Czeslaw, Gândirea captivă. Eseu asupra logocraţiilor totalitare [The Captive Mind], Bucureşti, Humanitas, 1999

• Mucchielli, Alex, L’identité [The Identity] (4^e édition), PUF, Paris, 1999

• Ricœur, Paul, Soi-même comme un autre [Oneself as Another], Paris, Seuil, 1990

• Ricœur, Paul, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli [Memory, History, Oblivion], Seuil, Paris, 2000

• Sabbah, Danièle, „Avant-propos” [„Foreword”], în Eidôlon, nr. 90 / 2011, „L’exil et la différence” [„The Exile and the Difference”], textes réunis par Danièle Sabbah, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, pp. 7-40

• Simion, Eugen, Andrei Grigor, În ariergarda avangardei. Convorbiri cu Andrei Grigor [In the Rear of the Vanguard. Talks with Andrei Grigor], Ediţia a II-a adăugită, Curtea Veche Publishing, 2012

• Simuţ, Ion, „Cronologia exilului literar postbelic I” [„The Chronology of the Post-War Literary Exile I”], în România literară, nr. 23 / 2008, URL: http://www.romlit.ro/cronologia_exilului_literar_postbelic

• Simuţ, Ion, „Cronologia exilului literar postbelic II” [„The Chronology of the Post-War Literary Exile II”], în România literară, nr. 24 / 2008, URL: http://www.romlit.ro/cronologia_exilului_literar_postbelic_ii

• Solal, Philippe, „L’exil de soi ou le commencement de l’humain” [„The Self-Exile or the Beginning of the Inhumanity”], în Eidôlon, nr. 90 / 2011, „L’exil et la différence” [„The Exile and the Difference”], textes réunis par Danièle Sabbah, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, pp. 43-50

• Spânu, Petruţa, „Exil et littérature” [„Exile and Literature”], în Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, nr. 3 / 2005, pp. 164-171.

The Posthumous Dan Botta’ s Poetry or The Released of Abstruseness

Dan Botta is one of the greater writer in the inter-war period whose work remains almost unknown during his life. He published only a volume of poetry during his life and the rest of the poems were published only after his death thanks to his wife. These poems are considered to be superior through their musicality, the coherent imagology, the concretness even if they keep their inner mistery. The series called Rune suggestes the images of immateriality and also the image of the Greek and Latin mythology. The Ephigrams is another volume from this period of creation and it makes the connection between the hermetically poetry and love poetry. The Ariadna’ s wreath is a series of love sonnets, which seem to be written by somebodyelse because the expressions are more clear and because there is no ambiguity. For Botta love means a way of urge towards a higher level of knowledge. The sonnets are in fact a kind of songs for the sweetheart and love is for the poet a symbol of purity and perfection. Poems and Poem at once represent also the posthumos Botta’ s poetry. The poems looks like the German ballads, but we can also find the feeling of love which is very powerful.

In conclusion, Botta seems to be a poeta doctus, who likes all lirics discourses, he cultivates the details and all of these give his poetry an original note.

Key words: mythology, Ariadna, Rune, imagology, hermetism, poeta doctus.

• Biberi, Ion, Ultime eseuri / Last Essays. Bucureşti: Editura Cartea românească, 1985

• Botta, Dan, Scrieri / Writings, vol I. Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură, 1968

• Crohmălniceanu, Ovid, S., Literatura română între cele două războaie mondiale / The Romanian Literature Between the Two World Wars, vol II. Bucureşti: Editura Minerva, 1974

• Piru, Alexandru, Varia. Bucureşti: Editura Eminescu, 1973

• Pop, Ion, Dan Botta- poet apolinic / Dan Botta- The Apollonian Poet, în rev. Echinox, an 1, nr. 5-6, iun-iul, 1969, p. 9

The New Confession between Public and Private. The School of Confessional Poetry.

The present paper aims to present the beginnings of the confessional poetry in literature and its evolution towards a new poetic mode that sets in its centre the most intimate thoughts of the poet and claims them to pertain to his self and more importantly, he/she thrust them to the reader. The confessional poetry needed a long time to become the poetry of Plath or Lowell. It took a long way to take the shape we are familiar with now. From the Romantics to the poets of the ’60, the confessional tone in poetry has evolved towards the expression of the deepest feelings in the human soul. In the following lines I introduce the confessional poets and the main themes they use in their poetry.

Keywords: confession, poetry, religion, modern

• ***Antologie de poezie modernă. Poeţii moderni despre poezie (manifeste, eseuri, fragmente teoretice)/ Modern Poetry Anthology. Modern Poets about Poetry (manifests, essays, theoretical fragments) Muşina, Alexandru, Romulus Bucur, Editura Leka Brâncuş, Bucureşti, 1997
• *** The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy Editors, Fifth Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005
• Lowell, Robert, Life Studies and For the Union Of Dead, Farar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1965
• Phillips, Robert, The Confessional Poets, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1973
• Plath, Sylvia, The Collected Poems, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1981
• Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, 1968
• Sexton, Anne, Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, Marineer Books, New York, 1988

July Theses of 1971: Attitudes and Reactions in the Literary Journals

This paper aims to present a general survey on the first attitudes of the Romanian writers in the 70’s regarding the Theses of July 1971, a document imposed by Nicolae Ceauşescu that required certain political, ideological cultural and educative expectations from their part. The relationship between the political environment and social and cultural environment is not a mechanical one, and even a dictatorial decision is not always automatically applied and the way the initiator requires. That is why most of the writers did not comply with the proposed measures.
Keywords: July Theses, national-comunism, Party Ideology, literary journals. Keywords: confession, poetry, religion, modern

• Andrei, Ştefan, în dialog cu Lavinia Betea, I se spunea Machiavelli / He Was Called Machiavelli. Bucureşti: Editura Adevărul, 2011.
• Baranga, Aurel, Opere vrednice de timpul nostru / Works worthy of our time. În: România literară, 28/1971.
• Barbu, Eugen, Un îndemn în numele socialismului / A Call on Behalf of Socialism. În: Scînteia, 8840/1971.
• Botez, Demostene, Arta şi literatura în slujba educaţiei comuniste / Art and Literature in the Service of Communist Education. În: Scînteia 8840/1971.
• Ceauşescu, Nicolae, Propuneri de măsuri pentru îmbunătăţirea activităţii politico-ideologice, de educare marxist-leninistă a membrilor de partid, a tuturor oamenilor muncii / Proposed measures for the improvement of political-ideological activity, of the Marxist-Leninist education of Party members, of all working people, În: România literară, 45/1971.
• Ceauşescu, Nicolae, Plenara lărgită a Comitetului Municipal Bucureşti al PCR / Enlarged Plenum of Bucharest Municipal Committee of the Communist Party, toate ziarele
  din 13 octombrie 1971.
• Munteanu, Aurel Dragoş, Cu spirit partinic/ In the Spirit of the Party. În: Scînteia, 8840/1971.
• Popa, Marian, Istoria literaturii române de azi pe mâine / The History of Romanian Literature by Today to Tomorrow, Vol. 2. Bucureşti: Editura Semne, 2009.
• *** Condiţia durabilităţii / The Sustainability Condition, editorial. În: România literară, 3/1971.
• *** Întâlnirea tovarăşului Nicolae Ceauşescu cu membrii ai Uniunii Scriitorilor / Nicolae Ceauşescu Meeting the Members of the Writers’ Union. În: România literară,
  39/1971.
• *** Adunarea generală deschisă a organizaţiei P.C.R. a Uniunii Scriitorilor / Public Meeting of Writers’ Union’s Romanian Comunist Party Organization. În: România literară,41/1971.
• *** Scriitorii îşi spun cuvântul/ Writers Tell their Word, editorial. În: România literară,47/1971.
• *** Climat literar / Literary Climate, editorial. În: România literară, 49/1971.
• *** Demnitatea scriitorului / Writer’s Dignity, editorial. În: România literară, 51/1971
• *** Realitatea / Reality, editorial. În: România literară, 52/1971.

Literary Geography as a Paradigm of Literary History. A Comparative Approach

This paper aims to explore the situation and prospects of literary geography in the Romanian culture, especially its recent manifestations with reference to Western academia. Therefore many projects of transnational literary historiography emerged in the early XXI century are based on a geographic component, reflected by concepts such as “topographic nodes” (Marcel Cornis-Pope), “archipelago” (Hervé Thery) “(pen)insular” (César Dominguez) by recourse to atlases (Franco Moretti) or even GIS maps. In these circumstances, the question arises to what extent the literary geography works published in Romania (like Geography of Romanian Literature, today signed by Cornel Ungureanu) managed to synchronize with the western direction, represented by the research mentioned above. The originality of this paper lies in questioning Cornel Ungureanu volumes in relation to the similar synthesis from West and also in self-reflection on the ways in which ethnicity, historical evolution and cultural patterns determine the profile of a literature and culture of a predefined geographic area.
Keywords: literary geography, spatiality, literary history

• Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando, Gonzalez, Anxo Abuin, Dominguez, Cesar, A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, vol. I, John Benjamins Publishing Co, Amsterdam, 2010.
• Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando, The Spatial Turn in Literary Historiography, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5, 2011, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1903&context=clcweb (20.06.2013)
• Cornis Pope, Marcel, Neubauer, John, History of the Literary Cultures of East – Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20 th Centuries, vol. I – IV, John Benjamins Publishing Co, Amsterdam, 2004-2010.
• Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel 1800 – 1900, London, Verso, 1998
• Tally, Robert T. Jr, Spatiality, Routledge, Abingdon, 2013.
• Valdes, Mario J., Kadir, Djelal, Literary Cultures of LatinAmerica, A Comparative History, vol. I – III, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004
• Literatura română contemporană: Eugen Negrici şi Cornel Ungureanu. / Contemporary Romanian Literature: Eugen Negrici and Cornel Ungureanu. Lucrările Colocviului naţional universitar de literatură română contemporană, Ediţia a VIII-a Editura Universităţii Transilvania din Braşov, Braşov, 2011
• Simion, Eugen, Fragmente critice VI, Geocritica / Critical Fragments VI, Geocriticism, Fundaţia Naţională pentru Ştiinţă şi Artă, Bucureşti, 2009, p. 85
• Andrei Terian, Constructing Transnational Identities: The Spatial Turn in Contemporary Literary Historiography, Primerjalna književnost 36.2, Ljubljana, 2013
• Ungureanu, Cornel, Geografie literară / Literary Geography, Editura Universităţii de Vest, Timişoara, 2002
• Cornel Ungureanu, Geografia literaturii române, azi / Geography of Romanian Literature, today, Piteşti, Paralela 45, 2003Online Sources:
• Michel Collot, Pour une géographie littéraire, Le partage des disciplines, LHT, Dossier, 2011, http://www.fabula. org/lht/8/index.php?id=242 (17.06.2013)
• Mario J. Valdes, Linda Hutcheon, Rethinking Literary History – Comparatively, American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 27, 1994, p. 3, http://archives.acls.org/op/27_Rethinking_Literary_History.htm (19.06.2013)
• http://www.literaturatlas.eu/?lang=en (17.06.2013)
• http://isllv.zrc-sazu.si/en/programi-in-projekti/the-space-of-slovenian-literary-culture-literary-history-and-the-gis-based#v (17.06.2013)

Maps of knowledge through fragrances and miasmata. Patrick Süskind’s “Perfume”

The smell has an obscure identity, which fascinates in the measure it individualizes and rejects the person, if he forces its limits. For Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of the novel entitled “The Parfume” by Patrick Süskind, there is no object, place, man, stone, tree, bush, wall or corner he may recognize after its smell, keeping forever in memory alongside with the unique flash. Thus, the character conceives a map of knowledge through senses, being the only one possessing the coordinates. This instrument would grant him perfection, like a genie or an angel, a power stronger than gold, terror or death: the irresistible capacity to inspire love to mankind. The character’s identity would manifest plenary because the conflict between his own insignificance and the megalomania of his achievements.

Keywords: Patrick Süskind, “The Parfume”, map of senses, knowledge, the aesthetics of ugliness.

• Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant, Dicţionar de simboluri / Dictionary of symbols, vol. I & III [f.tr.], Bucureşti, Editura Artemis, 1994.
• Patrick Süskind, Parfumul / Perfume, traducere de Grete Tartler, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2005.